Ahead of the Curve: Odetta Insights on Successfully Working Remotely
Way before the concept of a pandemic spurred social distancing and widespread remote office work, I launched Odetta to leverage the emerging global gig economy and enable remote work by women in developing economies.
At Odetta, we have spent the last two years honing key processes associated with managing outsourced business process projects remotely and building a SaaS platform that has powered over 500 data, sales, recruiting, and operation projects to date including clients such as Google, Bloomberg, and Quora.
Today, Odetta is a 100% remote, asynchronous company with over 200 women on the team across 3 continents and 20 countries. We have learned a lot over the past several years on what it takes to make remote work freeing and empowering.
What are the benefits of remote work?
As we’ve seen in the past months, businesses are transforming from physical offices and full-time positions to digital, remote offices, and flexible positions. There are three potential benefits:
We’ve found that working remotely is extremely productive. For example, offices are often a hotbed for middle management and meetings which are expensive, require people to gather and often waste time. A one-hour meeting with seven people in it means seven hours lost, plus all the meeting prep time! Now factor in an average hourly cost per person and the true cost is mind-boggling!
Learning to communicate remotely means being extremely clear, but it will save you so much time.
Remote work allows you to access incredible talent in hidden places.
This is the fundamental brilliance of Odetta– most people want to be able to live in their ideal location and still be able to work in stimulating environments with meaningful challenges. Furthermore, in Odetta’s case, there are talent pools who are located in cities with skill sets related to jobs not available where they live, or there are people whose family environment does not allow for the traditional out of office 9–5. These people can continue their careers only if they can work from home and at different hours of the day. Technology allows all of this to be easy, and more efficient due to time zone arbitrages.
How did Odetta set up its virtual environment?
From the very beginning, I focused on having a positive virtual environment. Without offices or daily meetings, I knew my team needed a strong remote mentality. I look for self-driven individuals that take initiative, but also know when to ask for help. I prioritized “live documentation” so that everything would be recorded and if problems arose, they would be easy to find. Rather than having daily meetings, I focused on creating a culture of informal communications using Slack and text messages. We also built systems for real-time, team feedback and temperature checks like our Happiness Survey to make sure suggestions for improvements were heard by all. Lastly, we have a great sense of community and an actively engaged workforce that communicates on WhatsApp and Facebook which helps us to know each other and empower one another from opposite ends of the world.
Any tips for starting a remote-work business?
Have remote work in your DNA, especially in the founding team. Being documentation-heavy and process-oriented will launch you miles ahead and save you time. Similarly, lean into trust and delegation within the business. Are you the type of company that needs to institute a screen recorder to Big Brother your team, or did you hire well enough, and motivate well enough, and incentivize such that your team works on the companies behalf? The later team will have a much better remote experience. You should also be metrics-driven so you know what’s going on and you can be responsive and proactive to changes. Lastly, remote work is smoother when it aligns well with the type of work you perform– whether it be asynchronous, instruction-based, or requiring little brainstorming.
Over the past three months, I’ve heard so many friends and family members talking about Zoom fatigue and the issues they’ve faced dealing with working remotely. But really, if you approach remote work with a more careful focus on productivity, success, and happiness, you can host fewer meetings, have clearer communication, and much more flexibility in your schedules. Then, the remote-work model can be freeing, not taxing, and empowering, not exhausting.